The Phoenix Point writing competition is now live. The winning entry will be included in the official lore, featured on the website and in our newsletter. The winner will also receive a Signed Collector's Edition of Phoenix Point on release.

I just had this idea, wouldn't it add a bit more strategy if we were able to order our soldiers to switch to semi-auto or auto in case they we need to converse ammo?

Edit: following /u/doglywolf 's idea, i think it should be universal for anyone using an Assault Rifle or SMG.
If you in semi you fire a single more damaging shot while in auto you fire a burst, less accurate but more damaging

So I finally cleared all the question marks on the geoscape. I was a bit frustrated that there were areas with huge mist infestations that I didn't have access to, but I was limited by the havens available.

When I first started out, my objective was to make Phoenix a global enterprise, so I was looking to have refueling stations that circumnavigated the globe. The ability to go all around the world is something I guess I took for granted from the X-Com days. I had a route almost complete, but a hostile haven forced me to take a longer path around through North America (instead of a shortcut through northern Canada). I saved that haven REPEATEDLY and they still were hostile (preventing the building of a refueling station). Eventually they were destroyed (I didn't let it happen on purpose, I was just out of position as I had been exploring further south).

Ended up with 6 manticores, all loaded with 8 soldiers a piece. I never ended up building a radar station (I was so focused on refueling stations). I had 1 armadillo that I built fairly early, and then discarded once I had enough crew to man that manticore without it. The armadillo is awesome against that killer queen from BB2, but in BB3 it couldn't hold a candle to 5 extra guys (counting the driver) running around potentially with grenade launchers. My squads usually had 1 tech, 2ish heavies, and generally the rest were assaults. I used marksmen as little as possible (understanding that they may get abilities in the future that may make them more situationally useful).

My tactics definitely shifted, and overwatch and turrets became virtually unused. I would use the extra action points to get better positioning, and with the assaults if I accidentally stumbled on an enemy I could usually "exert" to muster enough action to take care of them. The turrets seemed awesome, but with their static nature and me generally assaulting forward every turn, they became pretty much obsolete. The main application I would use them for was occasionally dropping one behind me, usually in hives, to cover my back so I could focus on assaulting forward. It seemed like a neat idea, but I found that I was usually moving forward so fast that I could pretty much ignore any reinforcements behind me because I would be killing off the egg layer thing before they'd become an issue.

Idk about you guys/girls but I really really like the lore for this game. Couldn’t get enough of the stories, fragments, and reports. I really hope they release more lore on the mist and what happened early on.

I'm having an issue trying to run the game, I have the launcher installed but kept getting a network error while trying to install the game to get around This I downloaded the game via browser but although it's in the phoenix point folder in the program files when I try to locate the game with the launcher it can't find it in the phoenix point folder though I know it's in there. any help?

Let me start off by saying this game looks awesome and I'm definitely getting it at some point. Now, if I were to buy the backer version now, what would I get? I realize that it's a work in progress but what would I be able to play now? Is it just one or two missions or is there more to it?

IMO it really encourages tile crawl, overwatch spam gameplay. I'm assuming this is just for this build since they only just added the Mindbugs, and because Overwatch is really weak ATM due to soldiers shooting when they have no clear shot.

Thoughts?

I assume that with 1WP OVerwatch, and no 'Rest' action to freely get back WP, you will be forced to advance at a steady pace through the level IF you want to have a decent overwatch coverage 100% of the time.

Which is actually a really interesting and cool way to do pacing, IMO.

At risk of sounding like a filthy casual, I'm only really familiar with the recent Xcom reboot. Something they do in those games is having a few voiced characters around the base.

In both games they can basically be reduced to:

Second in command: deals with intel and mission objectives.

Chief scientist: deals with research.

Chief engineer: deals with making things.

They discuss and explain things to each other, allowing the faceless, nameless, voiceless player character remain our blank slate avatar. Is there going to be similar characters in Phoenix Point? I don't really know if such characters existed in the original X-COM games.

If so, do we have any ideas what/who they might be, or thoughts developers might have about making them feel different from what we've seen in Xcom:EU/2.

If not, how are they planning to deal with things like exposition and story? I suppose the entire story could be done with text, or voiced A.I. assistant, similar to Terran missions in StarCraft.

I just haven't really seen any discussion about this and I'm curious. Although, I'll admit, I've not followed the development as closely as I could. I know the developers are probably prioritising getting mechanics working properly before working on this, but I assume this is something they've thought about.

The time limits, I mostly hated how they were done in XCom 2, even though I played the game a lot. The worst thing about it IMHO was that the AI and abilities of the aliens were not really designed for you to have no time limit to deal with in most cases, so just turning the time limits off didn't work (it would make the game too easy). In contrast, in XCom: EU the alien's AI and abilities were built for them to have more prolonged fights with you, was my impression anyway, so it worked fine even though most missions didn't have a time limit.

Really it confused me how they came up with a great compromise for this in EW (getting 0-2 meld canisters per mission) and then dropped it for straight timers in their sequel. I was like, WTF guys, why would you get a working game mechanic and then drop it?

So yeah, my personal hope is to probably have a time limit of some kind on some mission types but not to usually have one.

I want to know how playing the campaign would feel like in the grand scheme of things. Will it be like XCOM where the game feels like a super long RTS game or will it be more RPG-like, where the commander has a personality. Like maybe you side with Anu and in one playthrough you somewhat accept or even follow their religion and in another playthrough you side with them as a means to an end, and in both instances get feedback in the form of a slightly different quest or dialogue or tech reward or something. Will there be rpg-like interactions and repurcussions is - I guess - what I'm asking.